Cinema as aesthetics and politicity. Hermeneutical approaches to mexican documentary cinema

Abstract

In this article, the relationships between cinema and the world, cinema and reality, cinema and truth, will be explored in the light of the “political” act of the medium, in a broad sense that puts political and politicity in tension. These relationships could not be understood without looking at the historical transformations of the cinematographic medium, without its understanding as a complex framework, an assemblage that intersects languages, contexts, practices, sensations. In cinema the visual world and the textual world collide. The imaginary and symbolic possibilities of the moving image enter into a fray with the narrative and diegetic potential of the story told. This is where the politicity acts of cinema occur, which we understand here from a dynamic acceptance, inscribed both in the experience and aesthetic evaluation of making and seeing cinema, as well as in the technological and configurative dimensions of the medium.

To undertake this approach, we turn to the voice of Diego Lizarazo Arias, philosopher, researcher, creator and analyst of image and cinema, in order to recognize and explore contemporary problems around the tensions between cinema and politics. Author, among other works, of La fruición fílmica (2004), Lizarazo undertakes an aesthetic, semiotic and hermeneutical approach to the phenomenon of the “cinematographic possible”, which is explored here through an interview conducted in May 2021, in which we follow the keys to their responses, shared with the confidence of having met as colleagues from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolita (Mexico) in various forums and seminars. Likewise, in light of the dilemmas raised here, we recover some relevant examples from the Mexican documentary to underpin the elements that link cinema and politics in the contemporary context.